At the Brooklyn Museum, You’re the ‘Oracle’

Courtesy Heather HartHeather Hart’s “The Northern Oracle,” on display at Franconia Sculpture Park, Minnesota, was an earlier version of her new piece at the Brooklyn Museum.

People have long sought advice from oracles — but sometimes, the oracle is you.

That’s the message of “The Eastern Oracle,” artist Heather Hart’s full-scale replica of the top half of a house that will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum starting on April 13. Viewers enter the “oracle,” but instead of a high priestess, they see only a mirror.

“People come to a shrine or oracle to ask advice. [Here] they will see themselves, so it flips the responsibility. It gives power back to you,” said Ms. Hart.

Beyond the function is the form itself. Like Ms. Hart’s earlier rooftop piece, “The Northern Oracle,” “The Eastern Oracle” is a social piece of art that Ms. Hart designed and constructed with skills she learned from her father.

The resulting “roof” is structurally sound enough for visitors to climb up on top of it.

Art without a “Do not touch” sign is sure to be popular with kids, but there’s more to it than solid construction. The roof has a chimney that lets in the rotunda’s natural light, giving the interior an open, rather than claustrophobic, feeling and a serenity that feels like a sanctuary in one of the museum’s most-beautiful spaces.

The installation — the fourth in the museum’s year-long “Raw/Cooked” series to highlight local emerging artists — was partly inspired by pieces in the African and Egyptian collections. But the closest reference is the Jan Martense Schenck House, a prized exemplar of 17th-century architecture that Ms. Hart’s piece evokes.

“Her art is site specific in an architectural way,” said Museum curator Eugenie Tsai. “There is something special about the rotunda and Heather has really tapped into that.”

The challenges were as enormous as the piece itself. Ms. Hart needed help erecting her epic-sized installation, so she raised more than $7,000 in a Kickstarter campaign. And then there’s the nervousness that comes from rushing to finish an important work in the borough’s most-important institution on time and on budget.

Turns out, that was the least-daunting thing for this future art world star.

“When the museum comes to you and says, ‘What do you want to do?’ it’s amazing,” said Ms. Hart.

“The Easterbn Oracle” at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway at Washington Avenue, (718) 638-5000, April 13–June 24. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. For information, visit, brooklynmuseum.org. Heather Hart will be on hands for a workshop on April 21.

Jessica Thomas lives on Classon Avenue. She began writing for The Local in January, 2012.

If this person’s story is true it would be the most incredible Kickstarter story ever; not for the project but for all the remarkable and inconceivable misfortune that this person had to overcome directly before and during the founding of his project. A real life Forrest Gump type of story.

Here you have a man “with such a severe combination of dyslexia and spatial dysgraphia that he can’t even write words down correctly as he looks at them” who nonetheless is an incredibly talented graphic designer and who after seventeen years “has created what just might be the most ambitious and innovative font ever devised.” Who starts a Kickstarter project to give the font away only to have his remarkably intelligent six year old, who is perfectly normal, be placed in a hospital mental ward. Both he and his wife lose their work as a result of trying to get their child out and the family ends up with $3 and less than week before becoming homeless. To add insult to injury, in the middle of all this Kickstarter disabled his ability to access his project yet continued to collect money for it. Despite all this and much more which I have not noted, the project was successfully funded and the most remarkable part is that the project creator claims to have a “forth coming revolutionary project” that “will have incredible mass appeal, enact substantive societal good and may even profoundly impact an industry” I do not know if that is true but he puts his personal phone number out there for anyone to call.

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Get news about Fort Greene and Clinton Hill in our daily roundup, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s summer slate of youth-oriented programs and the third annual Art of Brooklyn Film Festival coming to St. Joseph’s College in Clinton Hill.

In today’s daily post, you’ll find news on the spring opening of the Fort Greene Artisan Market, a Pratt Institute student artwork display at a Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan and a new recording studio in the nabe.

In this crime report, locals told police that their belongings were stolen from cars and trucks, their homes were burglarized and their bank accounts were used in unauthorized ways. Also, disputes between significant others resulted in violence and robberies last week. The trend of robberies on the B38 bus continued last week, with another incident on May 4 marking the tenth such robbery in the precinct this year so far.

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